Statue in Bentonville not about animosity

Recently, Sheree Miller took up a protest against the Confederate soldier [statue] on the Bentonville square. She said he has been a sore spot for her for the 25 years she has lived here. She said he shames us as new people come to the area. She said he was put there in 1908 by the Daughters of the Confederacy as a “red flag for people of color to know that the Confederacy is still alive and well in Benton County.”

It seems as likely to me that by 1908, 42 years after the end of the Civil War, 30 years after Reconstruction ended, in a bitterly poor South, there was finally enough money to put up a small statue, not a grand monument, to remember the lost men. As for the little soldier being a red flag to people of color, it is not clear how many people of color lived in Benton County in 1908 and needed to know the Confederacy was still alive and well. Today as we become more homogenized — Bentonville no different from Boston — new people everywhere, the little soldier acknowledges our hurtful past. It is ever before us. He does not bespeak a racism we long for, but a lesson learned.

Nonetheless, I am sorry that Mrs. Miller is affronted by the little soldier. He is family to many of us. He was there before we were born, a familiar fellow. Looking again at him, I see no animosity, no warning coming from him, no grimace of anger or spite, no fist, but more a weary resting from the battle lost. He is not even heroic in a grand way. He leans on his rifle. He does not brandish it or threaten.

Maybe the little soldier is just a mirror showing us ourselves — the love, hatred, guilt, sorrow we bring.

The ancient soldier reminds me, perhaps only me, of our humiliation, not in losing the war that could not be won, but, worse, in our eternal association with the reprobate idea that one person can own another and the fruit of his labor. That idea caused and causes so much suffering. But he also reminds me of the courage to face that humiliation, to be really wrong, suck it up and go on, making life better for his family and those who would follow, including Mrs. Miller and the people coming here.

Mrs. Miller asked, “What would Harriet do?” None of us knows. None of us knows the great suffering and injustice Mrs. Tubman saw and experienced. We do know that she acted probably because her love of justice and suffering people was greater than her fear of death.

At the end, when the dross and hatred had burned away in the deaths of 750,000 men, perhaps it was only love that mattered. Perhaps Mrs. Tubman would say, “Let them lay down their grief for the dead, the maimed, the never the same.” Perhaps Mrs. Tubman would say, “Let them bury their dead with honor, for they were loved.”

CYNTHIA HASELOFF Springdale